“A Complete Unknown” stars Timothée Chalamet as a young Bob Dylan, and is written and directed by James Mangold, who very loosely based his script on Elijah Wald’s 2015 book “Dylan Goes Electric!”
Mangold is of course no stranger to biopics. He earned a best picture Oscar nomination for “Ford v Ferrari” and his Johnny Cash hit “Walk the Line” also earned several cast and individual nominations.
However, “A Complete Unknown” is hard to categorize as a biopic. The film introduces a young Bob Dylan hitchhiking to New York City in 1961 and spans only a few years from his meteoric rise on the folk scene up to his surprising shift to electric guitar at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival.
Along the way, Bob visits his idol Woody Guthrie in the hospital and falls under the tutelage of Pete Seeger. Edward Norton is so folksy in his portrayal of Pete Seeger that he makes you wonder whether he would have been a better choice than Tom Hanks for Mr. Rodgers in “Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood.” Dylan soon falls under the respective spells of fellow musician Joan Baez, played by Monica Barbaro, and Sylvie Russo, a fictional character based on Dylan’s real-life girlfriend, played by Elle Fanning.
The script is fairly light. Bob meets several fellow musicians, walks along City streets and navigates relationships during the political upheaval of the sixties, finding inspiration for new lyrics at every turn. However, the film fails to peel back any new layers on the enigmatic poet, and the director delivers mere glimpses of his writing process, often in the middle of the night while a lover sleeps nearby.
As a result, as good as Timothée Chalamet is as Bob, without more musical insight I couldn’t help comparing watching him with the performances of Himesh Patel playing Beatles songs in “Yesterday” – beautiful lyrics heard for the first time by an audience without any context. Monica Barbaro’s performance as Joan Baez brings a spark here and there, as does Boyd Holbrook as Johnny Cash, but Elle Fanning doesn’t get much do in the role daylighting such an important influence in Bob’s early career. Fanning’s most impactful dialogue is “I’m a plate” in a heartbreaking final scene.
So, on my ski trail rating system, “A Complete Unknown” earns my intermediate BLUE ski trail rating. Worthy of a holiday weekend trip to the movie theater, Timothée Chalamet’s performance and a terrific supporting cast anchor this enjoyable, lyrical interpretation of Bob Dylan’s transition from folk to electric. But overall, the film is a superficial telling of fictionalized events and encounters which influenced the complex evolution of Dylan as a musician and writer. The music is good, but the script lacks the depth of “Walk the Line” or the heart of “Rocketman” or “Bohemian Rhapsody.” The result is merely a performance CliffsNotes treatment of one of the country’s greatest poets of all time.
“A Complete Unknown” is playing in theaters with a setlist run-time of two hours and twenty minutes. “A Complete Unknown” is curiously rated R for language, guitars that kill fascists, and Pete Seeger’s defiance by banjo.
